And then, of course, there was when CTV cut out in the middle of the postgame trophy ceremony to start an episode of Masterchef Canada, and dumped the rest of the postgame show on TSN2 (as a bonus, many distributors took a minute or two to end substitution on Fox):

Tune in to @SportsCentre on #TSN2 now for Super Bowl post-game coverage including highlights, interviews, analysis and more!

People seem to think TV is free just like Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Except — it’s not. You have to pay for everything in life, and most of the time it’s pretty straightforward.
Using something but cannot figure out how you’re paying for it? Then you, folks, are the product being sold. In this case the NFL puts on an event and companies buy the right to show you stuff and promote their products.

So why are the commercials in Canada so bad? Simple. The companies cannot be bothered with you.
You’re insignificant, you’re not going to buy their products, and frankly, they’re just not into you.

Nothing, not one thing, stops any of the companies from buying commercial time on the Canadian broadcast. Except the fact they don’t care about you, and they know you’re so desperate to see their ads you’ll hunt them out wherever you can.

Every tweet, every FB post, every whine about not seeing an ad is another affirmation that Canadians are a bunch of pathetic losers.

That’s not entirely true – the unsimsubbed ads do make it to Canada from the originating network. And US companies do produce some specific Canadian ads very well. Plus a lot of the border affiliates do have Canadian advertisers on them, like say “The Brick” ads on WUTV in Buffalo.

But overall, you’re right, I just think that Canadian production standards are lower for some reason. Yes, there’s not as much money available here, and I guess the equipment they use to shoot these commercials isn’t as advanced. You can always tell a Canadian ad / show from an American one very easily.

I’ve found CTV NFL coverage beyond horrible this entire year. I don’t think they have any actual paid sponsors. They set a new low however when they away to a sit-com right as the Super Bowl was being presented. I’d say CTV coverage is a joke except its not funny. I don’t like watching recorded sports but CTV coverage is so bad I might have to. Hope they lose the rights soon.

It’s what makes all the noise about “the only way Canadian channels can make money” seem silly. CTV didn’t have anywhere near a sell out of Super Bowl ads, even with an incredibly large nearly captive market, perhaps one of the biggest events of the year. If they can’t sell that, they pretty much suck.

Cutting out in the middle of the presentation and NOT having the sim-sub end at the same time is a crime in and of itself. It makes the sim-sub even MORE intrusive, causing more negative feelings towards CTV and pretty much making them the station you would avoid if you could under the circumstances. And yes, people do actively pay to avoid them, putting up antennas or traveling to friends houses who have antennas just not to be stuck watching the Canadian “version” of the game.

They said they did. I’m curious to see why you think they would lie about that. You may disagree with their decision to reserve spots for themselves to promote their other programming (hardly unique to CTV), but that doesn’t mean they didn’t sell out the ones they made available.

Besides, weren’t you the one arguing that CTV is actually making tons of money on advertising that Bell Media is secretly hiding somewhere?

Cutting out in the middle of the presentation and NOT having the sim-sub end at the same time is a crime in and of itself.

Not literally, of course. And this could be the fault of the broadcaster, the distributor or both.

“They said they did. I’m curious to see why you think they would lie about that. You may disagree with their decision to reserve spots for themselves to promote their other programming (hardly unique to CTV), but that doesn’t mean they didn’t sell out the ones they made available.”

Let’s look at it more reasonably: in the US, they sold every second possible to third parties, and took in tons of cash (upwards to 5 million per minute). Now, knowing that the Canadian market is MUCH smaller, you could still imagine that they could wrestle up some pretty decent numbers if there were in fact a big pool of buyers out there wanting to be on the Canadian version of the superbowl broadcast. For a company that (according to what the file with the CRTC) isn’t doing very well, you would think they would want to sell as much ad space as possible in one of the highest viewership programs of the year. That they are not shows either that they are making a ton of money on the spots they did sell and they could afford to give high priority to promoting their own programming, or… they set the number of ads for sale to a very low level so they could announce a sell out.

So calling it a sell out isn’t hard. Heck, you could say that your blog is completely sold out on commercial advertising as well, issue a press release and it’s true!

“Besides, weren’t you the one arguing that CTV is actually making tons of money on advertising that Bell Media is secretly hiding somewhere?”

I did not specifically say that CTV was making tons of money, you completely misunderstand. Bell as a company makes a billion or so a year, and broadcasting is nearly 50% of their revenues these days. My point was only that they are sucking the money out of the local market and using expense items like centralized switching and such to move the money away from the local station and up into the system. Crying poverty for the local affiliates is pretty much a standard act these days, as the affiliates (outside of news) generally no longer produce local programming , and generally run the same network based schedule 24 hours per day.

For a company that (according to what the file with the CRTC) isn’t doing very well, you would think they would want to sell as much ad space as possible in one of the highest viewership programs of the year.

Yes. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t also want to leverage that audience to drive viewership to its other programs and channels as well, where they can sell even more ads.

Bell as a company makes a billion or so a year, and broadcasting is nearly 50% of their revenues these days.

“Yes. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t also want to leverage that audience to drive viewership to its other programs and channels as well, where they can sell even more ads.”

it would be a good plan if those other shows were full of paid ads as well, but many of them in turn have significant promotional videos, and often the same very few running repeatedly. For a broadcaster that paints itself as having a hard time making ends meet, they seem to keep a lot of ad space for themselves.

As a side note, if sim sub is the big deal that it is, they would be benefiting more from the advertising on the US networks for upcoming shows, and wouldn’t need to push so much. They also wouldn’t be in such a rush to clip off the ‘coming up next week’ content that Americans often get, but which gets removed in Canada to allow for more ad space – which isn’t sold. It’s perplexing.

Bell Media is 50% broadcasting income… but hey, it’s all just numbers on a page to the CRTC, right?

For a broadcaster that paints itself as having a hard time making ends meet, they seem to keep a lot of ad space for themselves.

It came up during a CRTC hearing that the biggest thing that Canadian programs need isn’t more funding or better time slots, but better promotion. Bell Media in particular seems to have taken this to heart, which is why we’ve seen such an increase in the amount of promotion it does for its Canadian shows. It’s a strategy that paid off with The Amazing Race Canada, bringing it more than 3 million viewers. The upside is that Canadian shows get a lot more exposure. The downside is that there’s a lot of repetition for these promotional ads, which I suspect makes it seem as if they’re more frequent than they are.

As a side note, if sim sub is the big deal that it is, they would be benefiting more from the advertising on the US networks for upcoming shows, and wouldn’t need to push so much.

Since much of CTV’s ads are for Canadian shows, or for its specialty networks, it can’t just rely on U.S. ads. And with the amount of simsub going on, we’re not actually exposed to U.S. commercials very often in primetime.

The problem is, many times simsubs ruin the game / telecast as well. You just have to look to the NFC Championship game and CTV’s interruptions caused a key 4th and 2 play to be missed.

Simsubs in general just take away from the original flow of the American broadcast.

Bottom line is, we pay for American networks – and that’s what we should be able to watch. There is no need for CTV, Global, or any other worthless Canadian network that only interrupts US telecasts and contributes nothing to the Canadian Television landscape.

No it wasn’t a problem with FOX. I was watching FOX directly. FOX went to commercial break, but then came back mid-commercial after the ref added 1 second to the clock. I immediately thought of the poor Canadian folks who wouldv’e most likely missed out on the play thanks to CTV not coming back in time, and checking the Internet verified my suspicions.

Folks, get an OTA antenna and be done with these annoying Canadian networks. Most people are actually close enough to the US border to make this feasible. And most people in high rises in Toronto can easily get the Buffalo signals across the lake with a small indoor antenna.